Ever since I saw the Louis Malle directed French movie Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud (translated to English as Elevator to the Gallows or Lift To The Scaffold) and first heard this track*, Generique, I have been in love with the haunting music of Miles Davis; particularly his cool jazz tracks; though his contributions to bebop (along with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, etc.) are no less amazing!



* The soundtrack for the movie is probably as good as any Miles Davis album!

I'll leave you with couple great sessions with the Bird...






Amazing tenor sax playing by Lestor Young at the end (8' 10" onwards) and almost a minute of amazing scatting from Ella before that. Beautiful!

This reminded me of a poem I had written 10+ years back about love and death being similar.

When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims -- these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.

We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.

.. It is perhaps only in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstasy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer.

That's from an Introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides, who is the editor of the delectable collection of "Great Love Stories" - My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead. The book includes stories by some really renowned authors ("From Chekhov to Munro", says the sub-title of the book). There's Chekov, Faulkner, James Joyce, Guy de Maupassant, Vladimir Nabokov, and Isaac Babel. Then there is Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Milan Kundera, Eileen Chang, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver and Stuart Dybek. There are a few other authors who I have not heard of - including two by Harold Brodkey. I was surprised to see a story by George Saunders (Jon) and also David Bezmozgis's Natasha in the collection. But one has to admit this is unequivocally a compilation of some of the best stories from the last 100-odd years. Like Eugenides himself said about the process of choosing these stories: "How did I choose? The way people choose their mates: for intelligence, beauty, humor, and a sense that they'll be around for the long haul."

In any case, I hope to read some of these veritable gems in the next few weeks.

P.S. The title of the book is derived from the work of Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus, which Eugenides explains in the first part of his introduction.

Just read about a poet, Reginald Sheperd, who in his last blog post, wrote about a poem by his recently deceased mentor, Alvin Feiman, called True Night.

So it is midnight, and all
The angels of ordinary day gone,
The abiding absence between day and day
Come like true and only rain
Comes instant, eternal, again

...

Here every grief requires its grief,
Here every longing thing is lit
Like darkness at an altar.

As long as truest night is long,
Let no discordant wing
Corrupt these sorrows into song.

What a beautiful poem and an equally delightful post about the poem. Go read the poem as well as Sheperd's post about it at the above link.

I have not read (or written) any poetry in a long time but this makes me want to return all the fiction and non-fictions books I have to the public library and sit down with poetry books.

By the way, Reginald died sometime in the last two weeks since that post, victim to the cancer that he wrote, in the above post, was back. It is poignant to read his friends and acquaintances' comments at that post ...first wishing him a speedy recovery and then expressing their grief over his passing. (Tributes and links to many sites that remember him through this BookSlut post.)

And such is life. And so it goes.
P.S. Good essay by Shepherd earlier this summer - On Difficulty in Poetry.

Excerpt from Contributors' Notes at the end of Best American Short Stories of 2005.

Sometimes I think all good short stories function as ghost stories, in which the people, themes, events that grip an individual writer occur again and again like a haunting. Readers, too, can be hautned by stories. As for this story, something about painting and re-painting the rooms of a newly purchased house, now that I think about it, seems like a writerly metaphor. (Or perhaps a re-writerly metaphor.) Like ghost stories, and like the act of writing - and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting - the work is as much about concealment as it is about revelation. - Kelly Link

Stone Animals by Kelly Link is one of the 4 or 5 short stories from the collection that I am yet to read. Never heard of her before .... her writing seems to have gotten some rave reviews. And her website says a new collection will be out in October.

Naah...too many things to read. But I will get to Stone Animals later this week -- a review of that particular story is here, if you are interested.

I had previously posted links to two videos by the Pakistani sufi singer, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan but surprisingly it was not these two videos of performances from 1985, which are my favorite.

First, the qawali, Sochta Hoon Woh Kitne Masoom Thay

Simply brilliant!

And then this...Yadan Vichre Sajan diyan aayan te akhian chon menh wasda ("the memories of my old beloved came to mind, annd my tears drop like rain")

Just see the audience getting high on the music... (with music like this, who needs other substances to get high.)

Update: Leave you with a video of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's nephew, Rahat Ali Khan, singing the song, The Long Road, which was originally sung by his uncle (and Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, for the movie, Dead Man Walking. (Thanks to Amit for reminding me again of this performance, which I remember seeing sometime last year.) This video was a great way for me to start a Saturday morning... we all do walk the long road!

And I wished for so long, cannot stay...
All the precious moments, cannot stay...
It's not like wings have fallen, cannot stay...
But I feel something's missing, cannot say...

Holding hands are daughters and sons
And their faiths just falling down, down, down, down...
I have wished for so long
How I wish for you today

We all walk the long road. Cannot stay...
There's no need to say goodbye...
All the friends and family
All the memories going round, round, round, round
I have wished for so long
How I wish for you today

And the wind keeps roaring
And the sky keeps turning gray
And the sun is set
The sun will rise another day...

We all walk the long road. Cannot stay...
There's no need to say goodbye...
All the friends and family
All the memories going round, round, round, round
I have wished for so long
How I wish for you today
How I've wished for so long
How I wish for you today

We all walk the long road (3x)

and "that train keeps a-rollin'".... Folsom Prison Blues (over the years; Lyrics).







And so it goes. Time takes its toll.

P.S. Having listened to Ray Charles and mentioning that movie in the previous post, I had to go hear Johnny Cash and June Carter sing together since I loved the Cash movie much much more than the Ray Charles movie. (Only reason to compare them is because I saw the two in the same year and both are biopics about famous singers.) I thought Reese and Joaquin did such an amazing job - unbelievable that they sang the songs themselves. (For eg: Listen to them sing "It ain't me babe" and then listen to Johnny & June sing the same song.)

..Georgia on my mind; one of my favorite songs! Ray Charles is simply amazing in this song!



Here's Ray with Willie Nelson in a rendition of the song.


Here's Jamie Foxx performing the song with Alicia Keys at the Grammys. Not quite Ray but still very very good!



Enjoyed the movie too. Jammie fully deserved the accolades.

According to Billboard's Hot 100 chart, the biggest No. 1 hit doesn't belong to the Beatles or Elvis.

Its this one!! (And to think I never even heard of Chubby Checker before today!)

Santana's "Smooth," featuring Rob Thomas, is the No. 2 most popular, followed by Bobby Darin's "Mack the Knife," Leann Rimes' "How Do I Live" and "The Macarena" by Los Del Rio. The Beatles did make the top 10, coming it at No. 8 with "Hey Jude." But Olivia Newton-John's "Physical" and Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life" are ahead of that hit. Rounding out the top 10: Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together" at No. 9 and Toni Braxton's "Un-break My Heart" at No. 10.

Ok...let's twist again!

Seems, the name Chubby Checker is a take-off on then-popular singer Fats Domino! :)

I'll leave you with a link to the famous Indian "Aao twist karo" (Come, let's twist) song from the 60s ;)

One last music post this morning...before I move on to other things for the afternoon.

First up, a great solo by Eric Dolphy:



Hilarious how Dolphy just sits there as the drummer goes through a pretty good solo at the beginning. Then, as if he suddenly woke up, Eric Dolphy gets up and launches into an amazing solo on the clarinet.

Update: I just noticed that in a past post with videos featuring Mingus, I had linked to another video from the same performance as above. Both are excerpted from a performance by the Mingus Sextet in Oslo in 1964. A 1-hour video of that performance can be seen here through Google Video. Also through Google Video, a Eric Dolphy's performance of his composition Strength with Unity, from the Once Festival on 1 March 1964. (Amazing! The internet is a treasure-chest of such wonders!)

Also, to listen to some more great live playing by the Mingus Sextet, get the album featuring their performance at Cornell before going on the European tour. The album was released last summer by Bluenote and has been hailed as a "certifiable gem" and the "jazz find of the year" - almost on par with the great Coltrane-Thelonius Monk At Carnegie Hall recording from 1957 that was found in 2005 and on being released on Bluenote lived up to all the pre-release hype (Newsweek apparently refered to it as the “musical equivalent of the discovery of a new Mount Everest.”)

Also, just read that Dolphy, who decided to stay back in Europe after this tour of Europe with the Mingus Sextet, sadly died in a diabetic comatose in Berlin two months after the Mingus Sextet's tour ended. He was only 36. And apropos of that finding, I'm going to post 2 more videos (in keeping with my habit of posting 3 videos in Music tagged posts) featuring the very talented Eric Dolphy.

First, a performance from 1961 in Berlin playing solo a piece called "God Bless the Child"



and then a delectable little piece with Dolphy playing the flute!



Note: The title is from something Dolphy himself said in a short interview in Amsterdam, after the performonce there with the Mingus Sextet. It appears to be an interview which has been transcribed poorly into English; here's a much better interview, if you are interested.)

From Miles (with a brief detour to blues), I have moved on this morning to John Coltrane.

This hour, I enjoyed listening to full tracks from his amazing album, A Love Supreme at Last.fm.

But what's the point of listening to music, as I always do, without understanding why it is famous in a technical sense. So, since I have some free time and I do not understand anything about music, I tried to read up about Coltrane and understand more about his prowess as a composer and sax player. However, with no music training or understanding of what these terms mean, I have absolutely no idea what the following sentences, from the wiki link for Coltrane's 'sheets of sounds' style of playing, mean:

Coltrane employed extremely dense improvisational yet patterned lines consisting of high speed arpeggios and scale patterns played in rapid succession: hundreds of notes running from the lowest to highest registers. The lines are often faster than sixteenth notes, consisting of quintuplets, septuplets, etc., and can sound like glissandos. Coltrane used the "sheets of sound" lines to emphasize chords, modes, and such harmony. The music of Miles Davis gave Coltrane the freedom to apply harmonic ideas to stacked chords and substitutions. Further, this open approach allowed Coltrane to arpeggiate three chords simultaneously, a style Monk initially taught Coltrane. The "three-on-one chord approach" gave the music a fluid, sweeping sound that was harmonically vertical. Concepts of vertical (chordal) versus horizontal (melody) are key ideas in the work of George Russell, whom Coltrane had recorded with in September 1958. This approach reflected Coltrane's fascination with third relations. Sometimes he used diminished chords, other times he used augmented chords. At times, Coltrane might use scales or licks in the passing keys instead of arpeggios. Coltrane employed these harmonic ideas during his "sheets of sound" stage in 1958. At other times, he would simply play rapid patterns of diminished-scales.

Another great Coltrane album, which also features his 'sheets of sound' playing along with a new harmonic concept later to be known as 'Coltrane changes', is Giant Steps, which has two of his most famous pieces - Giant Steps & Naima (links to youtube videos of the tracks.) I, especially love, Naima, which apparently was a tribute to his then-wife, Juanita Naima Grubb.

You can also listen, via last.fm, to 3 tracks from another one of his great albums, Blue Train.

Leave you with a video of Coltrane playing his ever-popular, My Favorite Things



[Somehow, maybe due to too much familiarity with the tune, this does not do it for me like Naima or some of the pieces in Love Supreme do.]

Ok..since I did not provide youtube videos in my previous Music post, here are a couple unbelievable blues riffs from some living blues greats - Clapton, John Mayall, and B. B. King.

Steppin' Out recorded in 1966 by John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton. Like the commentator at the beginning says: "Eric Clapton playing like he's fixing (?) to blow your mind"...



And here's B B King with Gary Moore playing The Thrill is Gone (Oh no, BB...the thrill is all here, percolating into every pore of my body and blowing my mind!)




And here's John Mayall and Eric Clapton jamming together more recently in a live performance.



Some day soon, I have got to go see these blues legends live! BB King's already retired without me ever seeing him live. Will have to make do with just recordings of the King of the Blues now!

Update: Just read this... HALLELUJAH. Get prepared to have your mind really blown, Sanjeev. (I was unsure about my plans for Thanksgiving but everything else is now on hold because on November 28th he plays at the North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, MA. (That's the one on the scheduled itenarary closet to me, I think)

B. B. King might not be playing 250-plus shows a year anymore, but he seems to tour endlessly. After a summer filled with shows, he is still active, though the annual B. B. King Blues Festival was retired for 2008. King picks up his touring itinerary on September 6 in Laughlin, NV, with dates set through December 1 in Hagerstown, MD. The 31-date tour will take King through Mid-West, Southern, and East Coast states. No West Coast performances have been announced yet.

Update to the Update: I looked up ticket prices. Only tickets available in Beverly, MA are $337.00 each. I could drive 100 miles to the next closest location (Hartford, CT) and there are a few more options - but still very expensive ..

$174.00 each
$268.00 each
$317.00 each
$377.00 each
$387.00 each

I just blogged about King's music blowing my mind but this is mind-blowing indeed! Sigh.... I could get 100s of blues and jazz albums for that kind of money and blow my mind over and over again for hours and days and years to come. Ok... back to making TG plans -- visiting my sister or get-to-gether with friends -- that is the question! ;)

I had mentioned Miles Davis's milestone album Kind of Blue in passing in a previous post about his music. The album has been deemed the defining moment of twentieth century music, achieving popularity among musicians, critics, music historians, and the public at large (if 679 user reviews at amazon.com, almost all praising it, were not enough proof - listen to the previous 4 links from a documentary called "Kind of Blue - Made in Heaven" where a number of people from various walks of life heap praise on the album and tell you what it means to them.)

This month, I have Kind of Blue and also Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain (another collaboration with Gil Evans) playing over and over again. Made in Heaven indeed!

Unlike my previous posts, I have decided to not link youtube videos to tracks from either album here. Go get it from the library or buy it and listen to it over and over again. Like one reviewer wrote:

Listening to this album will immerse you at once in a world that is dark, brooding, sophisticated, very cool, sexy, and langorous. Bottom line is: if you don't have this record in your collection, you don't have a collection.

Or like another reviewer (same as earlier one? Many of the sentences are the same in the two reviews. Either same one or a plagiarizer is at work at one of the two sites!) wrote:

Immerse yourself in Kind Of Blue, and you enter a dark and mysterious, almost sexy world with a zen like calm. This album isn’t just an album, it’s an experience.

Ok... I'll be kind. You can listen to full tracks of all but the 2nd track through Last.fm or all of them through Rhapsody, which allows you 25 free full tracks each month.

I just put up a "Status Update" on Facebook, which reads:

Sanjeev is having yet another anxious restless agitated distressed unsettled wasteful Monday! And thus, in quiet desperation, our lives drift along...

The "Quiet Desperation" comes, of course, from Henry David Thoreau's essay, Economy, from his book, Walden.

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation....... A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. "

Facebook has been, in some way, my "game and amusement" these past few months. (By no means do I spend more time there than at my blog... but my blogging has been going on for 2+ years while Facebook is a recent addition. I got into FB to keep in touch with a cousin but now have a network of 50+ friends and acquaintances linked there. I do not spend much time there now except heading there couple times a day to update my "status" and catch up on what other people are saying through their status or other posts. I, however, did spend a lot of time at the site playing Scramble and Word Twist in June-July even as I was launching in what has proven to be a frustrating job-search process. Now, after 3+ months of not getting anywhere with the job search, I lie in wait of an uncertain future - disheartened with discontent and wallowing in quiet desperation.

I can't wait for the day when I do not have the time to go put up dumb Status updates on Facebook!

Summer already over and we are officially into Fall* but a good book is worth reading any time. So here's a collection of short stories, recommended in an NPR piece on summer reading.

My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekov to Munro, edited by Jeffrey Eugenides

If you only read one (gasp!) book this summer, make it this one. Like a great mix tape, My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead is inspired and personal, a conceptually coherent gathering of seemingly disparate pieces that relies on Jeffrey Eugenides' artful curatorship to make it resonate as a whole.

By placing James Joyce next to Denis Johnson, Chekov next to Grace Paley, Nabokov next to Lorrie Moore and Stuart Dybek next to Miranda July, Jeffrey Eugenides makes familiar voices fresh and new and invites us to read authors we might not have picked up otherwise. He edits like a fan, not a scholar, and isn't afraid to pick favorites, which is exactly what makes this a book you'll want to keep forever and give to all your friends. Keep in mind, though, if it's romantic comedy you're looking for, you'll want to skip this collection and hit the movie theater instead. But if you're in the market for jaw-dropping, miss-your-train-stop, weep-in-front-of-strangers writing, you can do no better than this truly stellar collection.

Actually, there is another fine collection of short stories that I need to get hold of (or maybe buy) - The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford. Its the "new" book because apparently, Ford had edited similar collection in 1992 of short and long stories. This "new" one has 44 stories, with an overwhelming majority of them written in the past 15 years.

* Aah...trust Wikipedia to teach me something (I *HAD to* look it up, didn't I!):

In the northern hemisphere, the meteorological start of autumn (fall) is on 1 September. The astronomical start of autumn is on the Autumnal Equinox (22–23 September) and ends on the Winter Solstice (21–22 December) in the northern hemisphere. Autumn starts on or around 7 August and ends on about 6 November in solar term.

So, summer may or may not yet be over depending on whether you take a meteorological or astronomical or solar look at it! :)

Apropos of nothing, a question for the day

Would you rather live a full life, full of fun and frolic, and live to be 90+ writing numerous mediocre short pieces, and a few mediocre novels or live a troubled life and die at age 44... but write what is arguably the greatest American* novel of the century?

Note: The examples I link to are only illustrative and I do not mean to compare the two writers. You could write the greatest Indian novel or greatest country-of-your-choice novel, for all I care!